Gab

Related page: Gab Verified FAQs

Gab is an English-language social media website known for its far-right userbase. The site has been widely described as a safe haven for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right.

The site was launched in 2017 and claimed to have almost 1,000,000 registered user accounts by July 2019. It has attracted far-right and alt-right users and groups who have been banned from other social networks. The platform populace is primarily "conservative, male, and Caucasian". As of 2018, the site's most-followed users included high-profile, far-right figures such as Richard B. Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Alex Jones.

Gab claims to stand for free speech and individual liberty, though these claims have been criticized for being a shield of the alt-right ecosystem. Antisemitism is a prominent part of the site's content, and the company itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary on Twitter. Researchers have written that Gab is "known to be hateful".

The site gained extensive public scrutiny following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, as Robert Gregory Bowers, the sole suspect, posted a message on Gab indicating an immediate intent to do harm before the shooting. Bowers had a history of making extreme, antisemitic postings on the site. After the shooting, Gab was dropped by its hosting provider and briefly went offline.

In February 2019, Gab launched Dissenter, a browser extension and website that allows Gab users to make comments on content hosted on any website via an overlay visible only to those logged into Dissenter or using the extension, and thus bypass their individual moderation practices. In April 2019, Dissenter was removed from the Firefox Add-ons website and the Chrome Web Store for violation of their policies. In July 2019, Gab switched its software infrastructure to a fork of Mastodon, a free and open-source social network platform. Mastodon released a statement in protest, denouncing Gab as trying to monetize racism under claims of free speech.